The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., features almost 40,000 three-dimensional artifacts, millions of documents and images, and thousands of hours of audio and video.

The digitization project, scheduled to launch later this year, will take about three years to complete, transforming the museum's nearly 500,000 photographs, more than 12,000 hours of recorded audio and video, three million documents and nearly 40,000 3D artifacts into digital content that will be available to future generations.

Another goal of the initiative is to help to preserve the historical content.

As part of the project, the EMC Consulting operation will develop a long-term strategic plan for digitizing and storing the collection on EMC Celerra network-attached unified storage systems (NAS). The system will use EMC's Avamar software for backup and recovery.

Using NAS technology will provide the Hall of Fame with a simple, yet effective way to reach its archival objectives while controlling network utilization, minimizing secondary storage growth, and reducing backup time, EMC said in a statement.

EMC said it would also provide support for the museum's videoconferencing education series, which has allowed tens of thousands of students across the country to visit the museum virtually through live video conferencing technology. The topic of baseball is then used by the museum to teach the students math, science and history.

"Through the support of EMC, the Hall of Fame will be well-positioned to deliver content around the globe, with these critically important initiatives to digitize and make available our assets to everyone, not just those who are able to travel to Cooperstown," Jeff Idelson, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement.